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Erudite meditations on the Danube and the blood-soaked lands through which it winds. Danube is not a travel narrative in the classic sense. The river is here a device for writing about a mix of colorful events and persons associated with it. Magris is a critic and his assessment of cultural phenomenon along the river's course is often excellent, especially when he deigns to tell the reader what he's writing about. It's a densely allusive work.

That said, the long essay on Louis-Ferdinand Céline—who stayed at on the Danube when the collaborationist Vichy government was forced there by the retreating Germans—is fascinating. Céline went from "the great voice of the people" before World War 2 to that of "an iniquitous traitor, an anti-semite hunted down and reduced to the scum of the earth on a level with the Nazi butchers" afterward. Yet Magris makes a compelling argument for his greatness while at the same time acutely rendering judgement.

The section on Jean Paul was beyond me. I never got a handle on the Catherine Wheel of abstractions Magris was spinning there. If there's a problem with this book, it's that the author—this, assuming the translation is accurate—fancies himself a stylist. I'm with V.S. Naipaul on this one: "good writing doesn't draw attention to itself." Yet the book is full of interesting arcana if you're willing to endure the flights of fancy.

Magris seems to have read everything and he wants you to know it. There are short essays on Hermann Schmid's little Danube tale, Franzel the Negress, a fiction in which her white lover makes her famous through his play The Queen of Sheba which, Magris writes, "exposes the whole savage shallowness of racism." The section called "The Archivist of Affronts" tells the story of one Ferdinand Thrän—known for The Cathedral of Ulm: an Exact Description of Same, 1857—who almost destroyed the cathedral by "his obstinate belief in a 'law' of arches which he was convinced he had discovered." More interesting to this reader was Thrän's File of Rudenesses Received, whose "precision and completeness . . .may [have] given a pleasure that compensated for the repulsiveness of what is actually noted."

The insight into the life and writings of the 19th-century Austrian writer, Adalbert Stifter—a great favorite of W.G. Sebald—was most welcome, as was the overview of Sankt Florian Church and monastery where Anton Bruckner played organ and wrote his great symphonic works. Other meditations include the double suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf and Maria Vetsera at , 1889; a scathing critique of Wittgenstein's house at 19 Kundmanngasse; the split between humanity and the natural world which Magris sees lasting as long as we eat other animals; an image of riding to war across the stone bridge at Regensberg, ca. 1150; a consideration of the putrefactive vigor of the soil in the Central Cemetery, Vienna; a brief overview of Hungarian Marxist scholar 's life and work, especially how his adherence to Stalinism compromised him; and a canny summation of the poetry of Romanian-born who Magris sees as "...probably the last Orphic poet, a religious reformer of Orphic poetry, bringing it to a blinding, primeval purity before it is snuffed out."

I started this book after finishing Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, also memoirs-cum-travelogues-cum-histories of the Danube. At first I thought that Magris's failure to cite Fermor a trifle fishy. But now I'm relatively certain that Magris, who wrote in Italian, was not influenced by Fermor.

Fermor's travels on foot along the Danube as an 18 and 19 year old in 1934-35 saw him meeting with Gypsies, interacting with locals, learning their languages (German, Romani, Hungarian, Romanian, etc.), sometimes drinking to excess, picking up girls. He often did not know from one day to the next where he would sleep. Some nights it was on a thatch of fresh tree limbs, on others in the splendor of some ducal château. At one point in the second volume Fermor rides a magnificent black stallion—Malek—across the Great Hungarian Plain. The river and its banks are much more visibly present in his books due to his gift for rich descriptive writing. One gets from Fermor a sense of the river's every turning, the vast changes in its topography as it moves more than 2000 km to its delta in the Black Sea. In Magris this travel aspect is minimal. Magris does not evoke such an intimate view of the river and its banks, much less mix it up with the common people. We hardly get to know even those friends with whom he travels.

In closing, the book is a rich source of information. However, it's a hodgepodge. It doesn't gel; it never seeks to be an extended narrative. It's an anthology of curios. Moreover, Magris is tremendously private. We learn only of his intellectual inclinations, not his personal ones. Who are these friends so fleetingly mentioned? Where does he live, city or country? We want to know something about him, but he keeps his guard up, there is virtually nothing. This is why, while Magris' book is certainly worthwhile, for me the Fermor books are the far more accessible reads about this fascinating river and it diverse peoples.